On Death

I am ashamed to have had nothing to say about Alexander Solzhenitsyn; it is years since I read him. I am, however, grateful once again to Frank Wilson for this extract from a 1978 lecture at Harvard. The line that catches my eye is 'To defend oneself, one must also be ready to die....'  A readiness to die is, as Solzhenitsyn notes, rare in a materialist society. But it is a very healthy thing - not just in self-defence, but also as the primary aspect of nobility. 'Men must endure/ their going hence, even as their coming hither/ Ripeness is all.' In which context, I read somewhere that the favourite movie line of David Simon, The Wire's presiding genius, comes from Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch. It is 'Let's go', spoken by William Holden's Pike Bishop. It means 'let's go and die because that's what we are here to do'; it is a summary of the entire movie and, though spoken by a villain, it should be a summary of the life well lived. We are all here to die, death is a duty. 'We owe God a death.' All of which is, I suppose, barely comprehensible out there in the anaesthesia of the shops, offices and cafes, but I thought I'd say it anyway. For Solzhenitsyn.

2000th Post: London Life

'Nothing works and everything is a rip-off.' Ironic Daughter on life in London.

And, yes, this is my two thousandth post - well, in fact, some of them were Nige's, but there's still two thousand, count 'em.

Thought Experiment

'In the end, I write about personal stuff because I can't write with the same accuracy about anything else.' William Leith in the FT.

This is an interesting -  though, in some forms, dangerous - idea. It hinges, first, on what Leith means by 'personal stuff'. If he were to say 'I have a pain', then his accuracy would be unchallengeable by any authority, even though, as Wittgenstein pointed out, the grammar of the sentence is wrong; it should be something like, 'There is a pain in the room.' But if he were to give his side of a row with a friend, then it would probably be no more accurate than his account of the Arab-Israeli conflict; a personal account is just that, a personal account But I can see how he arrived at the idea that it was safest and most honest to stick with what he knows best, his own experience. As I have said before, journalism lures one into an illusion of knowledge which, as the years go by, is increasingly undermined by one's increasing awareness of great ignorance. Most either aren't aware of their ignorance or they just decide to discount it. Others acquire academic envy - 'If only I could spend so much time on one subject.' - or they resort to the first person singular. (Leith, I should say, is the best in the business when it comes to this latter gambit, largely because he is so genuinely self-deprecatory; any criticism I have of the form is not directed at him.) The first person singular works in the market because it is also an editor's gambit. These days, newspapers and magazines love the personal confession. I tend to avoid this - out of embarrassment mainly - though I have been drawn in quite often. On the other hand, this blog is as outrageously personal as I have ever been. One reason for this is I haven't got time to engage in the research and fact-checking involved in my full-blooded journalism. So, whatever I write about, it's just how I see it at that particular moment; it is, therefore, whether I like it or not, about me. (Calling the blog Thought Experiments is, of course, a disclaimer, signalling the semi-detached nature of the ideas.) But I said this is dangerous, and it is. Believing solely in the accuracy of personal reportage amounts to a rejection of the accuracy of public reportage. It may be true that we can never be fully accurate about the Arab-Israeli conflict, but to start from the position that accuracy is impossible renders whatever you say or do next dubious. It is necessary to act as if truth is possible. This is a form of faith and, I suspect, the reason the personal has become so fashionable is because people find such faith increasingly hard or unacceptable. The personal, in short, is the secular. Or that's what I think at this moment without making any phone calls or looking anything up. It's just about me - okay?

Balls Makes His Move

I note that Gaby Hinsliff in The Observer says Ed Balls is 'a potential candidate' for Prime Minister. In fact, Balls is already well ahead with his preparations for power. 'Lord' Archer has agreed to be his Chancellor, Amanda Marcotte is coming over from the States as his internet adviser, John Prescott himself has agreed to take over at the Foreign Office and Balls's wife, Yvette Cooper, is going to knock the Home Office into shape. There is only one dream ticket and it's Balls.

On Being Thin

Now 22 pounds down in two months on my sensationally effective diet, I find the reactions of my paunchy coevals provide hours of harmless fun. The first glance is ambiguous: is he suffering from some terminal disease? I tell them I have been on a diet and they look relieved at not having to make small talk about my impending extinction - 'Cremation, burial, ashes scattered in the Solent? Can I have your Luccheses?', that sort of thing - then curious. I explain my regime which they, however paunchy, then subject to 'expert' analysis. Later, behind my back, they approach other friends or family. 'Is he all right?' 'You ought to get him off this anorexic kick.' and so on. The sub-text of all this is the feeling that it's not quite right to be this thin at my age, that men getting fatter with the years is the natural orders of things. This is, of course, nonsense. If I am supposedly anorexic now, was I anorexic in my mid-twenties when I weighed about 7 pounds less than this or in my mid-thirties when I weighed approximately what I do now? No. Face it, guys, getting fat is an avoidable error. 

More Wire: Snoop

In season 4 of The Wire - here I go again - there are two killers working for the new drug lord. One is Chris Partlow, a rationalising sort, the other is Snoop. Snoop is a girl, though I didn't realise this at first, she walks with a peculiarly exaggerated rolling gait, talks in very thick patois and wears an expression of bland unconcern. Her speciality is pouring quicklime over the bodies. In one masterly scene she buys a nail gun from a hardware store; the expression of mounting horror on the salesman's face is The Wire at its best. Snoop is utterly opaque, she betrays no hint of an inner life. She kills with the band insouciance of somebody buying a paper. I already had Snoop down as the most disturbing TV character of all time. But now, having done a little research, I am even more disturbed. She is played by an actress called Felicia Pearson and this is, get this, the full name of Snoop in the show. Her resume seems a little thin, alarmingly so. I am left the question: if she's Felicia in the show, is she Snoop in the real world? I would try to answer this question but I'm scared.

Political News

Good grief! I really must try and keep up with British politics. I didn't realise Harriet Harman was running the show last week and that Alistair Darling is now in charge. At this rate, if we can persuade Gordon to carry on mincing around Southwold in his weirdly long grey jacket, I should get a shot around 9th October 5638. Go nuts, guys. Also Boris is an Obamacon. Who knew? Who cared? And, finally, somebody called Dream Ticket, also known as Harivid Miliman or Daviet Harmiband, is going to succeed Brown. British politics - a mild squall in a very small tea cup.

Blogger Sacks Commenters Shock

Oh and, incidentally, I have decided to sack all my commenters. You are not fulfilling your quotas. Comments are now merely dribbling in. I know it's summer but this is not good enough. Without comments I feel lonely and not a little insane. I know you're out there, I have stats. You have 24 hours to atone, after that you're out on the streets.

The Books That Did Not Change My Life

Listening to the monumentally clunky Radio 4 show Open Book while driving yesterday - not wise this, narcolepsy can ensue - I heard someone say a book had 'changed their life'. People say this a lot. Today, for example, I note that Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen's curious earthly span was changed by Brideshead Revisited. It happens, I suppose, but I'm sure 99 per cent of these claims are meaningless. I can think of three books that changed my life - The Book of Common Prayer, Macbeth and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. The first changed the course of my sublunary journey because it exposed me to great English as a child, the second because, at the age of thirteen, it made me turn against the science and technology legacy of my family and the third because, at seventeen, it thrilled me. (This last influence was partly bad in that it hampered my ability to read different kinds of novels for years to come.) I have read equally great works since, but it would be absurd to say they have altered the character of my stay on this planet. I suspect that, unless there is some simple, direct influence - 'Sir Ranulph Wibbley-Wobbley's book on exploring the outer reaches of Dollis Hll inspired me to take up goat-herding and I have never looked back.' - nobody's material existence is changed by a book after the age of about eighteen. This is a good thing. A fool who kept performing an existential U-turn every time he passed Waterstone's staff picks would be a monster.

Jeff: Has He Lost It?

Idly checking 'Lord' Archer's blog I stumbled on this post. Even by Jeff's prose standards this is a stinker. 'Playwrite'! 'But nevertheless...'!  And that whole sentence beginning 'But nevertheless...' is a broken-backed masterpiece of illiteracy. Is this the man who wrote Not a Penny More, Not a Penny Less? I am beginning to think he must have had help.... well, some help.